docs VS clog

The interesting semantic relationships are those that let the machine automatically deduce optimizations

> I also like the idea of modifying function definitions at runtime. I have these visions/nightmares of programs that take other programs as input and then let me run experiments on how the program behaves under certain changes to the source code. I want to write metaprograms dammit

Lotta metaprogramming in Joy. Many functions work by building new functions and running them, it's a natural idiom in Joy.

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> A language designed around having first-class GUI support

Red? ( https://www.red-lang.org/ )

> Visual Interface Dialect ... is a dialect of Red, providing the simplest possible way to specify graphic components with their properties, layouts and even event handlers. VID code is compiled at runtime to a tree of faces suitable for displaying.

https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/gui.adoc

> You can’t work with strings, json, sets, or hash maps very well, date manipulation is terrible, you can barely do combinatorics problems, etc etc etc. I want a language that’s terse for everything.

That also sounds like Red.

> They are well funded.

Rebol Technologies went bankrupt, and Rebol is de-facto dead since more than a decade; Red barely manages to get by thanks to a recent crypto spike.

> I would say the languages are very different in the sense that Beads is clearly aimed at graphical interactive software.

So is Red with it's native GUI engine. [1]

> They are so different that it is hard to compare.

Both share the same goal of replacing modern software practices with biased, batteries-included toolchain, varying only in implementation.

> Red being a concatenative language has more in common with FORTH than Algol.

Red is not concatenative in any sense of the word, nor any other language in Rebol family that I know of.

[1]: https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/view.adoc

> What if a simpler programming language had first-class representations of a lot more than strings and arrays?

Red lang?

> Where most languages have 6-8 base datatypes, Red has almost 50.

https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/datatypes.adoc

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.